U.S. Senate hopeful urges feds to revoke WWOR's license

Citing what he called more than a decade of declining commitment to New Jersey, a congressman who is running for U.S. Senate called Monday for the state’s only commercial television station to have its license revoked because it abruptly canceled its nightly newscast last week.

The cancellation of WWOR’s 10 p.m. newscast was the latest blow for television news coverage of New Jersey, where residents traditionally have had little choice but to rely on scattershot reports from stations based in New York City and Philadelphia.

It comes two years after the state-run public station, NJN, was shut down and its license transferred to New York-based WNET, and 30 years after the politically arranged deal that brought WWOR across the Hudson River with promises of increased Garden State coverage.

“Now WWOR has pulled the plug on the only newscast the station had left,” Rep. Frank Pallone said in a letter Monday to Mignon Clyburn, the acting chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission. “This action deserves immediate enforcement by your agency.”

Pallone, a Monmouth County Democrat, is vying in a special primary for the nomination to succeed Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who died in office last month. He said he believed “the current license should be revoked until you can place additional conditions on the station to ensure that WWOR is both based in New Jersey and provides local news coverage to the state.”

A 1983 law sponsored by Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., granted automatic license renewal to any station that moved to a state without a commercial broadcaster, a description that fit only New Jersey and Delaware.

WOR, as the station was known at the time, was airing newscasts at noon and 10 p.m. and employed 230 people in 1986 when it moved from New York City into a $25 million headquarters in a former racquet club in Secaucus. But in a state that had long lived in the shadows of New York and Philadelphia, politicians continued to worry.

Gov. Thomas H. Kean demanded in 1986, after the station was sold, that its new owner renew the commitment to the state. Verbal assurances were given, but Kean’s attorney general complained they should have been made in writing.

By 2009, WWOR had cut back sharply on news coverage and was running many operations out of New York, where its current owner, Fox Television Stations, also owned WNYW. A citizens group opposing the renewal of WWOR’s license said it employed only 69 people in Secaucus in 2011.

A frequent critic was Lautenberg, who challenged FCC officials at hearings to explain why it was not forcing the station to meet what he considered to be a legal requirement to provide New Jersey-based news coverage.

WWOR canceled its half-hour 10 p.m. newscast last week and replaced it this week with “Chasing New Jersey,” which the station billed as a half-hour “topical program” on stories that place the state “firmly in the national headlines.”

Based in Trenton, the program features a “ringleader” who takes viewers through “a fast-paced, unpredictable ride across the state” with content provided by “chasers,” the station said.

A station spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Pallone’s letter.

Television has changed over the years, with broadcasters losing viewers to the far more numerous, and more lightly regulated, channels on cable and satellite. Politicians have also changed, as signified by Governor Christie’s decision in 2011 to dismantle NJN, the state-run public television network.

The FCC has been taking a more hands-off approach to many issues that it once strictly policed, according to Douglas Gomery, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland who has studied the agency and the industry.

“They believe broadcasters have basically suffered because of the huge amount of choice offered to average people,” Gomery said.

He said the FCC deregulated much of the industry during the administration of President George W. Bush. It was during this time that Fox Television’s parent company, News Corporation, was given a waiver from rules intended to discourage media concentration, allowing it to buy WNYW. The company also owned the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, but television stations and movie studios owned by News Corporation were recently broken off into 21st Century Fox.

Gomery said that despite New Jersey’s size, broadcasters are not interested in being based there because the state does not have its own designation as an advertising market. Rather, North Jersey is part of the New York market, the nation’s largest, and South Jersey is part of the Philadelphia market, which ranks No. 4.

“When advertisers go to buy, they go to buy by market size,” Gomery said. “New Jersey has always been and always will be a suburban state. I know Camden and Newark don’t sound suburban, but they’re not New York and they’re not Philadelphia.”

Some state leaders and citizens groups expect better coverage, however.

The license for WWOR expired in 2007, and a citizens group, Voice for New Jersey, opposed its renewal, saying the station was not meeting the commitment to New Jersey-focused public-affairs programming that the group believes the 1983 law required.

The FCC revealed in 2011 it had launched an investigation into allegations that Fox misrepresented how much New Jersey news WWOR was broadcasting and demanded documents from Fox. The station’s lawyers acknowledged that the documents it submitted may have been confusing.

“There were some pleadings going back and forth in that matter, and we found some glaring inaccuracies in some of the representations Fox was making,” said Voice for New Jersey spokesman Chuck Lovey.

Nothing has happened since then, however, Lovey said. “The lack of a response has been tremendously disappointing to us.”

He said he was “thrilled” to hear of Pallone's effort, especially given what he saw as a connection between the cancellation of the news program and Lautenberg’s death.

“Frank Lautenberg stood virtually alone as a champion of the cause of trying to get the station to live up to its commitment,” Lovey said. “They’ve been quietly gutting staff for years. Now a month after his passing, they shut it down entirely.”